Comments on: Bunker Tales http://www.ballardian.com/bunker-tales Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:59:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Chuck. http://www.ballardian.com/bunker-tales/comment-page-1#comment-1741 Chuck. Sat, 24 May 2008 23:43:50 +0000 http://www.ballardian.com/782#comment-1741 Excellent article. I don't think Burroughs intended to be intimidating...he just couldn't help it. Excellent article. I don’t think Burroughs intended to be intimidating…he just couldn’t help it.

]]> By: Mike H http://www.ballardian.com/bunker-tales/comment-page-1#comment-1738 Mike H Sat, 24 May 2008 18:24:24 +0000 http://www.ballardian.com/782#comment-1738 It was Ballard who cut-down Mike Butterworth's "Concentrate" stories from longer originals. What happened was that New Worlds rejected some of M.B's stories ("too unfocused"), so they were handed to Ballard as prose editor of Ambit, who after corresponding with M.B. offered to cut them down William Burroughs style. Ballard underlined parts of the text and Mike B. then retyped and edited those portions. Curiously, they eventually appeared not in Ambit, but in New Worlds, who'd rejected the original stories. There's photos of some of Ballard's letters to M.B. reproduced in Jon Farmer's book "Sieg Heil Iconographers" (published, of course, by Savoy). "Concentrate" magazine must win some sort of prize as the most unsuccessful mag ever published. I have a copy, which fell out of an old issue of New Worlds that I got hold of a while back. It was Ballard who cut-down Mike Butterworth’s “Concentrate” stories from longer originals. What happened was that New Worlds rejected some of M.B’s stories (“too unfocused”), so they were handed to Ballard as prose editor of Ambit, who after corresponding with M.B. offered to cut them down William Burroughs style. Ballard underlined parts of the text and Mike B. then retyped and edited those portions. Curiously, they eventually appeared not in Ambit, but in New Worlds, who’d rejected the original stories. There’s photos of some of Ballard’s letters to M.B. reproduced in Jon Farmer’s book “Sieg Heil Iconographers” (published, of course, by Savoy).

“Concentrate” magazine must win some sort of prize as the most unsuccessful mag ever published. I have a copy, which fell out of an old issue of New Worlds that I got hold of a while back.

]]> By: Supervert http://www.ballardian.com/bunker-tales/comment-page-1#comment-1740 Supervert Fri, 23 May 2008 13:28:38 +0000 http://www.ballardian.com/782#comment-1740 Ballard also cited Butterworth's New Worlds writing in the 1969 Jannick Storm interview: http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_jannick_storm_interview.html Butterworth was doing "concentrated" writing along the lines of Atrocity Exhibition and actually published a zine called Concentrate: http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/concent.html It would be interesting to ferret out the relations of the experimental writing done in the late 1960s by Ballard, Butterworth, et al, and how they all relate back to Burroughs' cut-up. Any doctoral students listening? Ballard also cited Butterworth’s New Worlds writing in the 1969 Jannick Storm interview:

http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgb_jannick_storm_interview.html

Butterworth was doing “concentrated” writing along the lines of Atrocity Exhibition and actually published a zine called Concentrate:

http://www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/concent.html

It would be interesting to ferret out the relations of the experimental writing done in the late 1960s by Ballard, Butterworth, et al, and how they all relate back to Burroughs’ cut-up. Any doctoral students listening?

]]> By: Crashman http://www.ballardian.com/bunker-tales/comment-page-1#comment-1739 Crashman Fri, 23 May 2008 09:36:07 +0000 http://www.ballardian.com/782#comment-1739 Superb article, sir. Anything about Burroughs grabs me instantly. I realize that I have myself similarly psychologically adapted to bunkerization. It is the ultimate extension of a modern Candide, to hole up in one's garden. Burroughs put most of his life down for us in images and print, and a brilliant one it is. His collaboration with Laurie Anderson in the mid-80s really struck me as pretty much the best stuff around The strange lines of the meetings and zero degrees of separation of Moorcock, JGB, Burroughs and Arthur C. Clarke as a group is reality-wrenching. So is how their artistic work was *suppressed before publication*. How UnAnglo-American can you get? madness... Unthinkable but it happened... To these men! When the works suppressed are about the mechanism of suppression, it becomes very self-referential. Thanks, Simon. Superb article, sir. Anything about Burroughs grabs me instantly. I realize that I have myself similarly psychologically adapted to bunkerization. It is the ultimate extension of a modern Candide, to hole up in one’s garden. Burroughs put most of his life down for us in images and print, and a brilliant one it is. His collaboration with Laurie Anderson in the mid-80s really struck me as pretty much the best stuff around

The strange lines of the meetings and zero degrees of separation of Moorcock, JGB, Burroughs and Arthur C. Clarke as a group is reality-wrenching. So is how their artistic work was *suppressed before publication*. How UnAnglo-American can you get? madness… Unthinkable but it happened… To these men! When the works suppressed are about the mechanism of suppression, it becomes very self-referential.

Thanks, Simon.

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